There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.
Abstract
The spontaneous food intake of six normal-weight male volunteers was measured for
24 days while the subjects were inpatients on a metabolic unit. They were fed a palatable
diet of conventional foods and were kept unaware that their food intake was being
measured. On days 7-18 the caloric content of their diet was covertly reduced by 25%
by substituting aspartame-sweetened analogues for all menu items containing sucrose.
Subjects did not alter their food intake for 3 days. Then between days 4-6 on the
aspartame diet, they increased their intake to compensate for 40% of the missing calories.
Food intake stabilized at 85% of baseline and remained the same for the rest of the
12-day dilution period. Subjects did not show a shift in either sweetened or unsweetened
food choices while their diet was being diluted. In adjusting for the missing calories,
they simply ate more of their customary diet. The replacement of sucrose by aspartame
tended to curb the weight gain observed on the baseline diet.